My first question here would fall into the 'ask Johnson' category if there was one (no pressure Bill). I'm interested in constructing a uniformly convex Banach space with conditional structure without using interpolation. The constructions of Ferenczi and Maurey-Rosenthal both use interpolation.

Using existing methods for constructing spaces with conditional structure I think it is possible to construct a hereditarily indecomposable space whose natural basis statisfies a lower $\ell_2$ estimate on any $n$ disjointly supported blocks vectors supported after the $n^{th}$ position on the basis and an upper $\ell_2$ estimate on all finite block sequences. The space $X$ is sure to be reflexive and probably doesn't contain $\ell_\infty$ finitely represented.

I would like to have some way of showing that $X$ is uniformly convex and this is where I'm stuck. Perhaps one could show that $\ell_1$ is not finitely represented in $X$ but as far as I can see this is not good enough (or is it?).

My question: If a space is reflexive and does not contain $\ell_1$ finitely represented is it necessarily uniformly convex?

I suspect the answer is no but I don't have a counterexample.

Another question: Are there any known conditions on a basis, which (1) do not imply the basis is unconditional and (2) do imply the space is uniformly convex?

2 Answers
2

Kevin, there are non reflexive spaces with non trivial type--even of type 2. James constructed the first one; his argument is very complicated. Later Pisier-Xu did it much more simply using interpolation between $\ell_1$ and $\ell_\infty$, but using the universal non weakly compact operator instead of the formal identity between the two spaces. See

I think James also showed that if $X$ does not contain almost isometric copies of $\ell_1^2$ (he called such a space uniformly non-square) then $X$ is superreflexive. This is no longer true for $n>2$, as James later constructed a non-reflexive, uniformly non-octahedral (no almost isometric copies of $\ell_1^3$) space, thus also having non-trivial type.

Maybe you can check whether your space is uniformly non-square. Connecting it with your last question I think that you would have to verify that $\exists \delta>0$ such that for any normalized block vectors $x$ and $y$ (but not necessarily disjointly supported) there exist a choice of signs such that $||x\pm y||<2-\delta.$ I don't think this condition implies unconditionality.